Friday, February 18, 2005

According to a recent poll of high school seniors 36% feel that the first amendment goes "too far" in protecting free speech.

"Sinclair Action was created to bring balance to Sinclair Broadcast Group's ( the largest single owner / operator of television stations in the U.S.) programming, by drawing attention to the company's misuse of the public airwaves to promote a conservative agenda via a nightly' news and commentary ' segment titled ' The Point' . " (here)

If you are tired of huge communications conglomerates using public airwaves to promote ONLY their own political viewpoints and no other, there is something you can do about it! Just click on one of the above links to find out how....

Thursday, February 17, 2005

First I should explain how I came up with the name, "Headless Lucy", for the band. I had been playing guitar for at least ten years and I was recently divorced, so I had a lot more time on my hands than I was used to. I owned a small carpet cleaning company and one of the cleaners, in fact the only one besides me(his name was, Terry) heard me playing Led Zep's, "Good Times/Bad Times", one afternoon. He asked if I would teach him what I knew about playing guitar and I agreed because I had the time now and it would be a fun project.

Terry turned out to be the most motivated and driven guitar player I had ever run in to. After a few years, we had developed quite a good size reportoire of hard rock, classic rock songs,power ballads, and old time blues----- not to mention all the old Stones' covers from the Brian Jones era. I lived ,at the time, on an old dude ranch that had what used to be guest cottages on it. The cottages were constructed in 1949 out of adobe blocks. I had about five neighbors in my immediate area and we lived in the high desert of southeastern Arizona in isolation, about two miles from the nearest town. Tim, my neighbor, said he had always wanted to play the drums, so he went out and bought a kit and took some lessons. We soon started the laborious process of adding a fledgling drummer to our musical project. Another year of practice and we had the kernel of a rock band. People started showing up uninvited to listen to our sessions.

They often asked what the name of the band was? We three had never thought of ourselves as a"band". Our intentions were much more modest. But it would now appear that we did , in fact, have a band and would need a proper name for it. Many names were considered and subsequently discarded. One day as Terry and I were driving from Huachuca City to Tombstone to do a carpet cleaning job, I was thinking about a murder that had happened in Phoenix years before. Odd things pop into your mind at odd moments ,occasionally. A woman's body had been found in a dumpster and the horrifying thing about it was that the murderer had chopped her head off, so the authorities were having a hard time identifying her body. Seemingly with no context to the time and place we were inI said, in a low voice, "Headless Lucy".

Terry said," What? What did you say?"

"Headless Lucy."

"Why in the name of God did you say that?"

"Oh, it just popped into my head", I replied.

We both laughed at the strangeness of this "Headless Lucy" remark and decided that it was so out of left- field that it would make a good band name. It was gruesome and at the same time silly and very resistant to analysis. The name seemed to mean something , but what? No one could really say. I came up with some seemingly logical reasons for inventing the name. One was that I named the band after anthropologist Louis Leakey's famous Headless Lucy skeleton that he found in Ethiopia.Another one was that Charlie Brown wised -up to Lucy's football trick and kicked her head off instead of kicking the football. But the truth of the matter is that the band was named after a nameless and headless murder victim that was found in a dumpster in Phoenix ,Arizona.

Tuesday, February 15, 2005

The current mess with Social Security began in 1983 in the administration of Ronald Reagan. Under Reagan's direction Social Security withholding was doubled. The excuse for doing this was that because of the size of the baby boomer generation a "surplus" of funds would be needed to take care of the BOOMERS in their retirement years. The surplus was supposed to be what Reagan called "a trust fund" which would enable the country to pay the baby boomers their promised retirement without unduly strapping the upcoming Generation-X. Reagan, of course, spent the money as fast as he could get it on unapproved and even illegal operations---- calling the funds a "surplus" that he was free to spend in any way he saw fit. Now we have another Republican president who wants to tamper with your retirement money. If you think you'll ever see any of the funds you put into your "private SS acount" you are seriously mistaken. My sources for this information are:

Ronald Reagan, "Remarks on Signing the Social Security Amendments"-1983, from: The Public Papers Of Ronald Reagan.

Friday, February 11, 2005

"White House credentialed fake news reporter`Jeff Gannon` from fake news agency `Talon News` was cited by the Washington Post as having the only access to an internal CIA memo that named Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as a covert CIA agent. Gannon, in a question posed to Wilson in an Oct. ,2003 interview referred to the memo( to which no other news outlet had access....). Gannon subsequently has been subpoenaed by the federal grand jury looking into the Plame outing." from: dailykos.com in a Jan.,30th posting by SusanG

Just the latest from the Neo-Feudalists in the White House in their attempt to control and twist the news to make it into overt propaganda. Just type "Talon News" and hit the search button for all the breaking news on this story.

Monday, February 07, 2005

Corporate taxes under Reagan and now GWB have reached their lowest point since 1929. This fact alone should give any reasonable person a good idea where things are headed in this country and the world. Corporations, who DO use water, electricity, garbage collection services and all the other things provided by government through taxes, are now taxed at a lower rate than individuals are. They also receive special discounts on the resources that they use. This trend in America, for individual citizens to pay for the services used and the collateral environmental damage caused by corporations through their payroll taxes, began in the administration of Ronald Reagan. The now discredited theory used to describe this situation was aptly called the "Trickle Down Theory." We were promised a trickle and we did not get even that. Real wages, after adjustment for inflation, fell in the Reagan years as they have in both Bush administrations. -(1)-

Labor was also hard hit during the Reagan administration
After Reagan fired all the air traffic controllers for striking for better working conditions and hired permanent replacements, corporate employers followed suit, thereby, for all intents and purposes, emasculating the Labor movement and turning the clock back on the decades of progress made for the American working man. Far from being upset by these developments the majority of voters inexplicably were enthused by them.-(2)-

So, during the Reagan years taxes were lowered on the upper 1% of the income tier, thereby increasing their wealth tremendously, and those in the lower income tiers received meaningless decreases accompanied by a DOUBLING of withholding on their Social Security. In addition, the Reagan administration could spend this "surplus" on whatever they chose. And they did-- every cent of it-- with no accountability to anyone but themselves. One of the things that they spent the money on was right wing death squads south of the border. They also spent the money that they acquired illegally through arms sales to the Iranians on similar projects south of the border. This was the famous Iran-Contra scandal that many of Reagan's minions were convicted of master- minding and participating in. Reagan, of course, alleged that he had no memory of these dealings-(3)-, hence his other popular moniker: "The Great Forgetter", a name that would prove to be ironically apropos in the ensuing years.

Reagan,as well as George W. Bush, ostensibly believe in smaller government, a strong military, lower taxes, and a balanced budget. However, both presidents have lowered taxes for the rich, increased military spending, and almost paradoxically created larger government and crippling budget deficits.-(4)- which they then leave for their successors to deal with. My belief is that these presidents did and do believe in a weak and small government and concurrent unanswerable and vast power in "private" multi-national corporations. The strategy now is to weaken our government,which is the only force powerful enough to control the corporations, by deliberately bankrupting it. There is no other reasonable explanation for their behavior.

This is why I hate Ronald Reagan.
Knowing these things, would you consider Reagan to have been a patriot, a knowing traitor, or an unwitting dupe of huge corporate interests? This fracturing of governmental power is a worldwide phenomenon and the way it's being done is similar in many respects for the different countries involved. The power vacuum is, of course, being taken up by huge multi-national corporations. This is what is being referred to by scholars who know as "the New Feudalism." But that is a topic for a different post.